Archive for October, 2012

Photo Vocabs are visual dictionaries on a wide range of topics: Sport, Places, Food, Society… Choose from thounsands of illustrated vocabulary units, with more added daily.

Halloween, which falls on October 31, was born out of traditional Celtic and Christian holidays that focused on the dead. Now this holiday is mostly secular and just for fun. Every Halloween children wearing costumes go to neighbors’ houses asking for candy; and houses are decorated with fake cobwebs and skeletons.

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Play our free Video Booster of the Day: a 6-step learning experience based on the Video clip of “How To Be A Zombie” from Super 8.Video Boosters are interactive learning units based on short clips from hit movies, TV series and music videos. Choose from hundreds of Video Boosters with new ones published daily. http://th.english-attack.com/

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College graduation rates continued to improve around the world during the recession, according to a recent international economic study. In more developed countries, the percentage of adults with the equivalent of a college degree rose to more than 30% in 2010. In the United States, it was more than 40%, which is among the highest percentages in the world.

However, improvements in higher education are harder to achieve in these countries. More developed economies have had the most educated populations for some time. While these countries have steadily increased education rates, the increases have been modest compared to developing economies. At just above 1%, the U.S. has had one of the smallest annual growth rates for higher education since 1997. In Poland, an emerging market, the annualized rate was 7.2% from 1997 to 2010.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Education at a Glance 2012 report calculated the proportion of residents with a college or college equivalent degree in the group’s 34 member nations and other major economies. Based on the report, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 countries with the highest proportion of adults with a college degree.

The majority of countries that spend the most on education have the most educated populations. As in previous years, the best educated countries tend to spend the most on tertiary education as a percentage of gross domestic product. The United States and Canada, among the most educated countries, spend the first and third most respectively.

In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., OECD’s Chief Media Officer Matthias Rumpf explained that educational funding appears to have a strong relationship to how many residents pursue higher education. Private spending on educational institutions relative to public expenditure is much larger in the countries with the highest rates of college-equivalent education. Among the countries with the highest proportion of residents with a tertiary education, a disproportionate amount of spending comes from private sources, including tuition and donations. The OECD average proportion of private spending is 16%. In the U.S., 28% of funding comes from private sources. In South Korea, another country in the top 10, it is more than 40%.

Having more education helped people all over the world stay employed during the recession, according to the OECD. Between 2008 and 2010, unemployment rates among developed nations jumped from 8.8% to 12.5% for people with less than a high school education, and from 4.9% to 7.6% for people with only a high school education. For those with the equivalent of a college degree or more, the jobless rate went from 3.3% to just 4.7%.

Among the 10 countries with the highest proportion of educated adults, unemployment rates for those with a college equivalent ranged from 2.8% in Australia to 5.4% in the Canada. In each country, the rate remained lower than that country’s national average.

The OECD provided information on the percentage of residents aged 25 to 64 with a tertiary education for each of its 34 member countries, as well as for eight other nations. 2010 statistics on educational attainment, graduation rates, GDP per capita and unemployment rates also were provided by the OECD. The latest figures covering country-level education expenditure are from 2009.

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College graduation rates continued to improve around the world during the recession, according to a recent international economic study. In more developed countries, the percentage of adults with the equivalent of a college degree rose to more than 30% in 2010. In the United States, it was more than 40%, which is among the highest percentages in the world.

However, improvements in higher education are harder to achieve in these countries. More developed economies have had the most educated populations for some time. While these countries have steadily increased education rates, the increases have been modest compared to developing economies. At just above 1%, the U.S. has had one of the smallest annual growth rates for higher education since 1997. In Poland, an emerging market, the annualized rate was 7.2% from 1997 to 2010.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Education at a Glance 2012 report calculated the proportion of residents with a college or college equivalent degree in the group’s 34 member nations and other major economies. Based on the report, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 countries with the highest proportion of adults with a college degree.

The majority of countries that spend the most on education have the most educated populations. As in previous years, the best educated countries tend to spend the most on tertiary education as a percentage of gross domestic product. The United States and Canada, among the most educated countries, spend the first and third most respectively.

In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., OECD’s Chief Media Officer Matthias Rumpf explained that educational funding appears to have a strong relationship to how many residents pursue higher education. Private spending on educational institutions relative to public expenditure is much larger in the countries with the highest rates of college-equivalent education. Among the countries with the highest proportion of residents with a tertiary education, a disproportionate amount of spending comes from private sources, including tuition and donations. The OECD average proportion of private spending is 16%. In the U.S., 28% of funding comes from private sources. In South Korea, another country in the top 10, it is more than 40%.

Having more education helped people all over the world stay employed during the recession, according to the OECD. Between 2008 and 2010, unemployment rates among developed nations jumped from 8.8% to 12.5% for people with less than a high school education, and from 4.9% to 7.6% for people with only a high school education. For those with the equivalent of a college degree or more, the jobless rate went from 3.3% to just 4.7%.

Among the 10 countries with the highest proportion of educated adults, unemployment rates for those with a college equivalent ranged from 2.8% in Australia to 5.4% in the Canada. In each country, the rate remained lower than that country’s national average.

The OECD provided information on the percentage of residents aged 25 to 64 with a tertiary education for each of its 34 member countries, as well as for eight other nations. 2010 statistics on educational attainment, graduation rates, GDP per capita and unemployment rates also were provided by the OECD. The latest figures covering country-level education expenditure are from 2009.

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I am dedicating this column to the Watthana police because the men in skin-tight brown rescued me this week.

AEC in 2015? That speels troubleThere are only a couple of years left before an entire nation needs to gain proficiency in English and if the garbled wording assaulting the senses of pedants at every turn is anything to go by, there’s work to be done … although there are a few positive signs

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Harvard was missing something. Surrounded by peers at the annual Latino Ivy League Conference in Ithaca last November, Daniel J. Artiga ’15 came to this realization: As students active in the Latino community described the resources provided on their respective campuses, he had little to add. “Yale spoke, Brown spoke, they all had something great to say,” he remembers. But then it was Harvard’s turn. “The other delegates and I mentioned how it would be awkward beforehand, because we didn’t have a lot to say,” recalled Artiga, vice president of the Latino Men’s Collective. “But it didn’t hit me until I was actually sitting in a room listening to other students bragging about how well their Latino community is treated—and how ours is, I feel, neglected.”

Harvard prides itself on being at the vanguard of new inquiry. Yet when it comes to the study and support of the nation’s—and higher education’s—fastest-growing demographic, some students and professors believe that Harvard is falling behind.

“Spanish was spoken in many parts of what’s now the United States long before English was spoken,” says Professor David Carrasco, a Professor of Latin American Studies at the Divinity School with a joint appointment in Anthropology. Carrasco is Mexican-American and has been studying and teaching about Latinos and Latin America for years. A friendly, intense man with a jovial voice that switches effortlessly from English to Spanish as students stop by his office, he says that some histories of our nation just don’t get taught.

“We’re not trying to say this here because we want to raise up the ethnicity of Spanish speakers,” he clarifies. “It’s just a historical fact.”

Latinos are part of the nation’s past. They are part of Harvard’s past, too. They are a vibrant and undeniable part of its present. And the Latino population is growing. Fast.Research on this swelling demographic and its impact is expanding at a rate similar to the population’s growth. And for good reason: The 2011 U.S. Census Bureau reports that the Hispanic population has almost doubled in size over the past decade. The nation’s largest ethnic minority, it accounts for 16.7 percent of the population—a number expected to reach 30 percent by 2050. And Latino students make up 11.2 percent of admitted students for the class of 2016.

Many of Harvard’s peer institutions offer either specific programs for scholarship of Latinos or cultural centers for their students. Students at Yale can go to La Casa Cultural, a cultural center founded in 1977. Stanford’s El Centro Chicano was established in 1978. Studying at Cornell? Minor in the Latino Studies Program.

Harvard has no equivalent.

“I’m struggling to find the resources and opportunities to explore my culture,” says Victor M. Flores Jr. ’13, who has been involved with College Latino student groups since he was a freshman. “There are still groups of color on campus that feel like learning about their culture and their communities and their history, and it’s difficult to access,” he says.

Efforts to bring such resources to Harvard, including attempts to create a center where students can have access to researchers and resources related to the Latino experience, stretch back approximately 40 years. This past April, Michael J. Trejo, a joint Kennedy and Business School student and the president and co-founder of the Harvard Latino Student Alliance (HLSA), published an op-ed in The Crimson, once again bringing demands for a Latino Studies Center to the fore.

Beyond drawing attention to the need for a more focused Latino Studies program, Trejo’s op-ed revitalized discussion of a student demographic that, while expanding, is—according to many of its members—talked about too little.

Visions for such a center at Harvard range from a social space where Latino student groups can meet and hold events, to a center or institute for scholarship and research opportunities, to a program of academic study within the College. The most cohesive plans embrace them all: a physical space where students and scholars can meet to discuss and disperse funds for the research and study of Latinos, accompanied by curricular offerings for College students.

Resistance to establishing a Latino Cultural Center is in keeping with Harvard’s long-standing policy on how it chooses to support ethnic and cultural student groups. With the exception of the Harvard University Native American Program, a University-funded office and space dedicated to supporting and educating about Harvard’s Native American community, no cultural student groups on campus have University-allocated centers. While this is true, many advocates of Latino Studies and of a Latino Studies Center laud the work done by the Department of African and African American studies, and the W.E.B. DuBois Institute, as models for what such resources might look like.

With the expansion of the Committee on Ethnic Studies—which, through curricular offerings and collaboration with student groups, offers support for those interested in the study of Latinos both in and outside the classroom—students and professors believe that Harvard is heading in the right direction.

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Canada’s foreign affairs department has confirmed that a Canadian has died in Thailand after Thai media reported that the bodies of a Canadian man and an Australian man were found Friday night in a Bangkok hotel room.

American Football is a feature of backyards, school playing fields, and television screens in sports bars and in homes all across the United States. Whether it’s tossing a ball around on the weekend, shouting from the stadium stands for your favourite team, or watching the Superbowl with friends, American football has become a unique expression of the country’s identity and character.

Like other American sports, American football has seen its vocabulary and idioms migrate from the playing field to become commonly used metaphors in business and society. This weekend, English Attack! immerses you in diverse aspects of the sport, giving you a feel for these language effects. On Saturday, Sandra Bullock talks us through game psychology in her Oscar-winning role from the film Blind Side, and on Sunday we travel to India to find out whether you can take the “American” out of “American Football” while still retaining what makes the sport so special.

This week’s SayWhat? video karaoke game focuses on two top-ranked American football teams this season: the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. Pick your favourite and help them score a touchdown by getting a good score!